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MONA LISA (1503-06)
Louvre Museum, Paris, France.
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519).
The Mona Lisa (1503-06). (Also known as “La Gioconda”)
The Mona Lisa is very likely a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the third wife of a merchant named Giocondo. It was Leonardo’s last great picture and one that he dabbled with for years, never quite satisfied.
The Mona Lisa is perhaps the best example of Leonardo’s “sfumato” technique. He renders faces and scenery with a “smokiness”, a slight indistinctness, that succeeds in creating a nearly lifelike impression.
And what of the world’s most famous smile? One interesting suggestion is that Mona Lisa’s smile may represent Leonardo’s own feelings about the beauty and mystery of life. Mona Lisa’s smile is not one of irresistible joy, for that would not express the doubts hidden in the human spirit. It is rather a smile filled with irony and intelligence, aware of the boundaries of human knowledge.
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519).
Renaissance genius, Leonardo Da Vinci, started life as the illegitimate son of a wealthy lawyer and a 16 year-old peasant girl. He was adopted by his father and grew up on the idyllic family estate near Florence. Gifted and confident, the young Leonardo happily plagued the region with his practical joking, bragging and daydreaming.
After discovering some of Leonardo’s drawings, his father sent the boy at age 13 to apprentice under Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence. In Verrocchio’s studio, Leonardo was introduced to the principles of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and geometry with no differentiation between what was “art” and what was “science”. For example, Leonardo studied anatomy with great curiosity. As an artist, what he learned allowed him a greater accuracy in painting and sculpting. As a scientist, he demonstrated that muscles acted like levers, the eye was a lens, and the heart, a pump.
Throughout his life, Leonardo’s pleasure in speculation and discovery never ceased. His varied career included stints as a painter, a lyre player, a heating and plumbing expert, a builder of canals and fortifications, and as he grew old, a teacher and conversationalist. Leonardo spent the last years of his life living in relative ease in a chateau near Amboise, France, provided by King Francis I.
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SELF-PORTRAIT WITH PIPE (1889)
Currently in a private collection.
Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890).
Self-Portrait with Pipe and Bandaged Ear (1889).
Following a quarrel with his housemate of the time (the painter Paul Gauguin), a razor-wielding Van Gogh fulfilled his jesting promise to a prostitute that he would give her “one of his funny ears.” After hearing of the incident from Gauguin, Theo arranged for a doctor to visit Vincent, help get him back on his feet, and get him back to painting.
This famous self-portrait, showing his still-bandaged head, is open to a number of interpretations. In some of his later works, Van Gogh expressed his innermost feelings with color, light and symbolism. Here, the division between the red and orange parts of the background and the spirals of smoke rising from his pipe may stand symbolically for Vincent’s rise into the spiritual sphere.
Though he may not himself have been aware of it, Van Gogh’s self-portraits can also be seen as perhaps the best realization of the post-modern sensibility of man: a wounded, frightened being who, nonetheless, possesses a fierce love for life.
Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890).
One of history’s most exciting but tormented artists, Vincent Van Gogh never sold a painting during his lifetime. Of course today, his works fetch for millions of dollars.
Van Gogh turned to painting at the relatively advanced age of 26, after a series of failures and other difficulties left him very few choices. He had been an over-sensitive child and a melancholic, lovelorn adolescent. As a young adult, Van Gogh became devoted to religion to the exclusion of all else, only to meet with rejection from those he wanted to help. Desperate for some way to prove his worth and to express his love for humanity, Van Gogh took to art with a fanatic, nearly self-destructive devotion.
In 1886, the 33 year-old Vincent visited his younger brother, Theo, an art dealer who was living in Paris and who had been supporting Vincent from his own small earnings. Inspired by the Paris art scene, Van Gogh became interested in color theory. In 1888, Van Gogh moved to the sunny south of France where he worked tirelessly.
Within the next two years, though he suffered several mental breakdowns, Van Gogh produced brilliant painting after painting in the blazing colors and frenzied brushstrokes that would one day amaze the world. Far from being the failure that he assumed he was, Van Gogh ultimately accomplished exactly what he set out to do with his art.
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